In the morning I read, in the afternoon I worked in the library, in the evening I was in the pool and tonight I’m with the student-journalists who are putting their newspaper together.
Which, in the scheme of things, makes this a pretty great day. Dinner could have been healthier, but I promised myself a Milo’s burger if I swam a lot. So it was that I caught up on the morning’s news. I sat in a deep leather chair and watched the reflection of the world in the dark corners of my computer screen poring in from the window behind me.
It was a beautiful day. I had a conversation about it while I was trying to make this panorama. A colleague and I decided we shouldn’t be inside, but rather on the quad:
Photosynth, showing me the errors in my panoramas, but only after I uploaded the thing, ever since I got the app. However, if you are in a picturesque place, that’s a pretty good free app.
I made it to the pool just in time to spend that sunlight-twilight-dusk-darkness period carefully avoiding drowning.
I swam 1.5 miles tonight. I’ve been told by the best swimmer in my house — and probably the best swimmer on our side of town — that I should note these measurements in a different unit. So I swam 2,700 yards.
I do not know what is happening.
Every third lap I did freestyle, so 900 free. And remember, I couldn’t do half a length of any pool like that this summer on account of my shoulder and collarbone.
The last 200 yards or so were even more ragged than usual. I am slow, and it isn’t pretty, but I am pleased.
Then a burger and fries. Finally back to the office for a night enjoying the editors put their paper together. It’ll be done sometime after midnight. It’ll be on newsstands tomorrow. I’m sure it’ll be another strong edition.
The marriage took place among friends and family who were encouraged to “blow kisses to the world” after she exchanged rings with her “inner groom”, My Fox Phoenix reports.
“I feel very empowered, very happy, very joyous … I want to share that with people, and also the people that were in attendance, it’s a form of accountability,” Nadien Schweigert told Anderson Cooper.
So long as you now feel accountable to yourself and, one presumes, for yourself.
Collins said she feels lucky to have a job and supervisors who will allow her to take paid time off to take care of her son’s return. For those who aren’t as fortunate, the death gratuity may be critical to their survival and sense of closure.
“While that benefit may not be urgent for me, it’s urgent for somebody. There’s somebody who needs to fly their family home. There’s somebody who needs to have expenses covered, or be able to take off work to handle the affairs of their loved one,” she said. “And to know that the government shutting down will delay their ability to handle their business, some people just won’t be able to do it.
While, financially,she is able to address her son’s return, Collins said she still could use help in paying for his funeral.
“I don’t necessarily have $10,000 to bury my son,” she said. While she is working with the funeral home to make arrangements, she wondered: “Am I going to be on a payment plan for the rest of my life so that my son can have the services that he deserves?”
You also have this feeling that this particular cruelty will be remedied right quickly now that Congress sees it played out in the media. And that should tell you everything you need to know about how the government works.
Jorge has lived with amputated limbs since he underwent a life-saving procedure at the age of 14 months because of an infection — most likely meningococcal meningitis, Dyksen said. “His skin was just rotting away,” she said. Today, he’s healthy.
It’s not only on the soccer field that Jorge has looked past his physical constraints. He’s also a member of the school bowling team, using both arms to roll a ball without holes. And he’s also prolific at text-messaging, family friend Carla Nash said, hitting away at keys without his prosthetic right hand. In the classroom, he holds a pencil between both arms.
[…]
He said he hopes to be a motivational speaker as an adult. “Because I know there’s people out there that really need motivation and everyone says I always motivate other people,” he said. “I help them get happy in their lives. I’m always smiling and I just feel like that’s the right thing for me.”
Good for Jorge.
You want video? They’ve got video.
“Nothing is impossible,” his teammates say. Special young man, there.
Because saying that, perhaps, you didn’t play that as well as, perhaps, you could and that, perhaps, people are put off by it is, perhaps, a step too far.
Made my fourth visit to the tuxedo rental store in the last month this morning. There is a wedding in which I will participate next weekend. To recap, I am trying to match up a rental tux with the one other civilian, a man I’ve yet to have the pleasure of meeting, in the wedding who owns his own. I first visited the local shop and left with something of a poor impression. I visited a sister store after work one day and found a more enthusiastic reply. So I returned to the original shop. The gentleman there had already begun inputting my data in the archaic 1997 software system they use for rentals. The second guy, at the second shop, who’s manly look and brusque attitude suggested he knew about making a man look good in fine clothes, was only countered by fingers so thick they couldn’t hit the keys, and an apparent misunderstanding about how form fields work.
So the first store again, last week, where I rented the tux. Same guy. Same uneasy feeling of general uncertainty. But it got rented. Last night, from the wedding party, I was informed of further details to consider and, ultimately, change. So that was this morning.
“We’d be happy to help with that, just as soon as I struggle with the system for 15 minutes because we can’t boot even boot DOS Shell on these machines and the cursor buttons are broken because of storeroom angst and won’t you please by this tiny cube of collar stays for $9 or this fancy tie blotting napkin for $18. How about some $100 jeans while you’re here? Our software is terrible, but Fred Flinstone is in the back coaxing the bird into hammering the text into the stone faster.”
“Also, that’ll be a $40 late upgrade fee.”
It was during this experience when I considered the customer vs. employee experience. All these expensive pieces of handsome finery, and you can’t even give your crew a workable system? Or hardware from this century?
“You’re going to love the way we telegraph in your order, I guarantee it.”
It turns out that the tuxedo will ship the original order. And then ship the subsequent late additions. This will all be delivered by the middle of the week, so at least they have one part of the PDQ distribution model down, but not the parts that make logistical sense.
So I’ll go back to the tuxedo rental place late Thursday, for the fifth visit, so they can check to see if any alterations are necessary. And I can pick it up on Friday, the sixth visit.
I could have made the tuxedo, if only I had the pattern.
And then there was a stop at the gas station. I chose the one that orbits outside a big box store, that has four pumps, eight hoses and 16 square feet of parking lot to maneuver into. I hate this gas station, but it is the second cheapest in town and it was on a direct path to get my oil changed.
And that was done quickly. They did not spray my door hinges with WD-40, which is a part of the experience that I found I missed. The guy ran through the safety check himself, so I did not get to do the lights, the high beams or the blinkers — or as he did it: libeamblink!. I did get to tap the breaks and honk the horn. The air filter continues to be a marvel of modern technology. All of the fluids and belts and hoses look good. All of this the guy said in 2.4 seconds, which gave me something to decode for the next 10 minutes and gave him an air of cool efficiency. Nothing was wasted, no move was unnecessary, and could you sign the receipt a little faster, please and thank you?
Then work. A fight with the copy machine. A last minute tweak to the afternoon class plan. Then the class itself. Notes, notes, notes, editing, and then an editing exercise. All very riveting for probably me alone.
Most people don’t find editing to be a gripping part of their classroom experience, and you can’t blame them for that.
Then some office time with office stuff. I went to the pool, but was mysteriously locked out. Through the door you could hear the sounds of what you might interpret as people having fun. Or, perhaps they were the sounds of people being chased by a horror movie character.
So back to the office then. Some work. And then dinner. And then some more reading and writing and … that’s pretty much the day.
These days, the web seems a bit less wild and more polished. Everywhere you look, there are signs that publishers are importing traditional journalism values to the constantly shifting digital environment. The web continues to do what it does better than print—delivering on-the-minute stories with a conversational tone to an always-connected audience—and the blog post, as one distinct unit of digital journalism, still offers what Andrew Sullivan called in 2008 “the spontaneous expression of instantaneous thought…accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers.” But increasingly, digital journalism does its business while embracing certain core beliefs typically associated with old media.
I just did a presentation on that not too long ago. Nice to know you’re not the only one that notices shifts and changes, big and subtle.
Fox says the new “news deck” is designed to appeal to viewers who are “nonlinear” — those who sift through news all day on their phones and computers. “Just like you, we get our news from multiple platforms,” Smith says, “and this is the place where viewers can watch us sort it all out as it happens.” In other words, Fox’s new newsroom will serve as a fact-checking machine for Twitter’s firehose.
I wonder if this will stay awkward looking, or if we’ll become accustomed to it.
“We are not going to ask for impeachment,” Conlon said. “We are coming whether they like it or not. We’re not asking for impeachment, we’re asking for the arrest of everyone in government who has violated their oath of office.”
Conlon cited the idea of a citizens grand jury – meaning a pool of jurors convened without court approval – as the mechanism for indicting the officials.
“We want these people arrested, and we’re coming in with the grand jury to do it,” he said. “We are going to ask the law enforcement to uphold their constitutional oath and make these arrests. If they refuse to do it, by the power of the people of the United States and the people’s grand jury, they don’t want to do it, we will. … We the people will find a way.”
The disapproval comes from angry constituents, baffled party elders and colleagues on the other side of the Capitol. But nowhere have senators found criticism more personal or immediate than right inside their own chamber every morning when the chaplain delivers the opening prayer.
“Save us from the madness,” the chaplain, a Seventh-day Adventist, former Navy rear admiral and collector of brightly colored bow ties named Barry C. Black, said one day late last week as he warmed up into what became an epic ministerial scolding.
“We acknowledge our transgressions, our shortcomings, our smugness, our selfishness and our pride,” he went on, his baritone voice filling the room. “Deliver us from the hypocrisy of attempting to sound reasonable while being unreasonable.”
So it has gone every day for the last week when Mr. Black, who has been the Senate’s official man of the cloth for 10 years, has taken one of the more rote rituals on Capitol Hill — the morning invocation — and turned it into a daily conscience check for the 100 men and women of the United States Senate.
And, finally, Picle still doesn’t know how to embed. But I still like the concept of a photo (or series) mixed with audio I can record and put together on my phone. It takes 10 seconds, and only needs an embed function. This has been around for a year now, so maybe someone else has an app. Let me check … Anyway, this is the day the weather broke. The sun is high, but it seems farther away. The air is dry and the evening is almost crisp. This is the first night it seems possible, I wrote on Twitter that we could lose that beautiful summer symphony.
Every year you hear the first one, but never the last.
Today we learned that yesterday’s problems with my bike were all about the index shifting, and almost entirely human error. That last part is not surprising, but it allowed me to receive a free education today, and probably, when I left the bike shop, they talked for an hour about how they could sucker me into any deal at this point.
So I got to ride around a bit on one of what will surely be the last really warm days of the year. Tomorrow will be splendid, and rain will come in over the weekend, even if Karen is breaking up in the gulf. That’s fine. No big storms necessary, just the rain. And behind that some drier, cooler air. Soon after will be the time the maple leaves will abandon ship, pushing aside the women and the children to fall from their sturdy branches, only to look up and realize they could have stayed around three or four more weeks.
I’m of mixed emotions about the whole thing this year.
But it was sunny and warm and I saw one other person on a bike late this afternoon. That was a kid on the side of the road, straddling his 26er with his right foot propped up on the curb and looking back behind him. I asked if he was OK, he nodded, and I dodged more traffic at the light. From the bike store I decided to find out where this side road, Longleaf, goes — because neither asking nor consulting a map will do. And about halfway down the road I remembered where I’d once before noticed this street name: on some other hilly road I’d rather not think about. Curiously I recalled that just as I got to the one big hill on Longleaf.
Then back into civilization, carefully denoted by the Shell station in the middle of nowhere, then a trailer park and then a few odd and end service businesses. Back up to campus, past the vet school where people walk across the four lane road without a care in the world these days, and then beyond the frat houses and through the athletics side of the campus.
Now I’m in a weird part of the day where to be in the shade is to be in a spot too dark for sunglasses, but it is still fairly bright when there are no trees, so I had a lot of one-hand eye practice today. There was a small, slow climb, I discovered another road on which it isn’t the last roller, but the next-to-last one that really hurts. Finally, back down toward home, through the growing intersection, into the neighborhood and so on. It was an easy and quick 20 miles, except for that one hill.
The Yankee said she saw me. She was going to the grocery store from somewhere just as I passed through that area. Said I looked good. Didn’t want to honk at me. Everyone else does. Usually it is the “You’re going too slow!” variety.
Otherwise there was school work, reading papers, grading things, dreaming up class possibilities, following the news, and so on.
Speaking of which …
Things to read, which I found interesting today …
A year after daily publication ceased in Alabama and New Orleans, media market is ‘fractured’ is about Advance’s moves in New Orleans, Huntsville, Birmingham, Mobile and Pascagoula, Miss. New Orleans has seen a Baton Rouge paper move in to give some competition and a daily publication outlet, so that dynamic market is interesting in different ways. Along the I-65 corridor …
The past year has been “a black hole for news in this city,” says Doug Jones, a Birmingham attorney who rose to national prominence for reopening and successfully prosecuting the infamous 1963 16th Street Church bombing case while serving as U.S. Attorney for the Northern Alabama district.
Jones said he and his wife are contemplating dropping their Birmingham News subscription in favor of the still-daily Tuscaloosa News, based some 60 miles south, which is testing the competitive waters by offering subscriptions in some Birmingham neighborhoods.
[…]
Combined average Sunday circulation at Advance’s three Alabama newspapers declined about 8 percent during the same period, with then-nascent digital edition circulation having little effect there.
[…]
“What I’ve seen, at least in this first year, is because of the reduction in resources committed to local reporting, we’ve experienced a dramatic decrease in quality news available to the community,” said Jim Aucoin, professor and chair of the Communications Department at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. “Investigative and enterprise coverage just isn’t there anymore.”
Birmingham lawyer Jones specifically criticized al.com and what he characterized as its generally superficial coverage. “You go online and there are all these teasers, but when you click on them, there are just two or three paragraphs,” he said. “And there’s no decent national coverage. Hell, we can’t even get good coverage of University of Alabama football anymore.”
I’ve never known Doug Jones to lie to me, but that as an absolute twist, stretch and tearing of the truth. As they say, ‘Bama gonna Bama.’
If they don’t say that, they should. Anyway, one more blurb:
Readers in highly technologically savvy Huntsville may be less troubled. “I think al.com has responded reasonably well to the increased [digital] demand by providing convenient and free online access to the state’s major newspapers,” said Eletra Gilchrist-Petty, associate professor of Communication Studies at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. “Overall, there do appear to be more strengths than limitations associated with al.com.”
Disclosure: I used to work for Advance. It is a private company, so the financial figures quoted in the Poynter piece are more of a learned guess from industry analysts. I can say this, which is relevant to my time there which ended with my return to academia several years ago, Advance’s al.com property is an impressive financial performer — largely on behalf of all of that Alabama football coverage. They know their audience, even when they should know better. So the point about looking at last year’s move by Advance as “not something that was done for an immediate payoff” is a good one.
I have faith in their numbers and in their revenue stream. I’m concerned, as others noted in the excerpts above, the link in the previous paragraph and some other material that has previously landed in this space about some of the content quality. I hope, and suspect, that will get worked it in the near future.
In our state Birmingham, Huntsville and Mobile, the three cities most directly effected by the shift last year, are the three biggest metros, boasting about half the state’s population. Clearly, there are a lot of people impacted by the daily miracle. (More than just the ones who read it, I’d argue.) Birmingham, if I recall correctly, is now the nation’s largest city without a daily newspaper. I’m not at all concerned about the medium. I’d rather we focused on the journalism. The more investigations and deep reporting, the better. The more people asking pointed questions of politicians, the better. The less time spent analyzing the quarterback and his girlfriend, the better. That’s not so much about the viability of the company as the company’s role in many communities.
The Alabama is one of the great success stories of Birmingham. It is a beautiful and historic facility that went from near demolition to once again becoming an event destination. You can’t see enough movies or concerts there. The last one I watched was The Godfather, which was the first time a digital print was ever played in that now almost 90-year-old theater. Also, the famous marquee was once a background of my blog:
And if that isn’t something to celebrate, I don’t know what is.
He was charged with aggravated assault, resisting arrest, terroristic threats and disorderly conduct because someone got alarmed, called the police and then, according to police, got a little belligerent. (His lawyer says the cops have it wrong and went to the First Amendment in his public airing of grievances.) He was also suspended from campus. He’s due in court later this month. It should be an interesting one to watch.
And now, YouTube Cover Theater the sometimes occasional Friday feature which allows people using their cameras, computers and their musical instruments as a demonstration of how much talent is hiding out there in the world. We do this by picking one original artist and finding a small handful of people covering the (usually) popular tunes.
This week’s featured performers are Hall and Oates. I selected them because I saw this video, one of the van sessions, from Nicki Bluhm and the Gramblers. What’s a van session? You’ll see. Press play:
Also, there is a kazoo. A kazoo, people.
They sound so nice, don’t you agree? That band is touring, which stretches the purposes of YouTube Cover Theater, but there’s something intriguingly hypnotic about watching a full band play in a moving van.
Here are the Miller Brothers, who could be playing in a Ramada Inn Airport near you with that sound:
Take two young guys, a Korg and some bad hairpieces and … well, these guys just need more views. Help ’em out:
Apparently they recorded that for Hall-Oates-Ween last year. Fitting.
You know that frame YouTube displays before you play the video? The one on this video doesn’t do the performance justice:
Hall and Oates are still out there rocking in America, this performance was from this spring:
And now you can feel old: She’s Gone was on an album released 40 years ago next month.
My doctor’s appointment almost made me late for physical therapy. That’s what you get for scheduling those three hours a part.
The receptionist at the doctor’s office kindly explained that they only had two doctors working. This, after you’ve been there 82 minutes, suggests a scheduling error and not a problem on the patient’s part.
That this has happened twice here, well, that suggests I’ll try not to come back.
Curiously, as soon as you say “I don’t want to be that guy” while proceeding to be that guy, they manage to find a room to put you in. And then, of course, the extra waiting begins.
Eventually the doctor shows up. Nice guy. He’s intent. He listens. He’s happy for your successes. He’s a shoulder expert. He does things to my shoulder, is proud of our progress and then, without thinking, claps me three times, right on the trapezius. Thanks, doc.
So I barely made it to physical therapy in time, where today they gave me a series of weights and we swapped up a few stretches. Everyone is pleased with the progress, me most of all. The doctor rightly noted that what we’ve done so far is basically with a month of new therapy work. In three or four more months, he said, I’ll be good as new.
And the equally good news is that I didn’t have to schedule another doctor’s appointment in the near future.
Picked up my bike from the bike shop this evening, where it has been held since last Friday. It needed a new front derailleur. They were so excited to give it back to me that they called twice yesterday.
When I picked it up tonight I was happy to have it back, too. I set out for a quick twilight ride … and the chain is rubbing the new derailleur cage. So I guess I’ll take it back to the bike shop, because one visit begets three.
But I rode the time trial route, and then climbed up two of the ‘biggest’ hills we have. They are tiny, really, but they are in a sequence. The second one is the largest. Today it was the easiest.
I turned left instead of right. Right was home, but the thing was already clicking and there was a little descent to take and then weaving through some easy road construction, past the museum, through a park and then back up the other side of that earlier big hill. There’s a side road there that takes you down into the neighborhood, and for a minute or two it makes you feel like a real rider. There’s a curve, a right turn that falls immediately into a curve and then a switchback to the left. Then there are houses, kids on bikes and adults unloading their cars with groceries and old men walking dogs. It keeps swooping down until it has to go back up and that’s the point where the darkness started to seep in under the tree canopy.
I met a cyclist going the other way. I only do that when I’m soft pedaling. So I had to stand up out of the saddle and finish the last bit of the neighborhood route home.
Can’t believe I have to take my bike back again.
We had dinner tonight, pizza, with our friends Adam and Jessica. Mellow Mushroom put us in the very back of the restaurant. We had pretzels, of course, and pizza, of course. And we had a fine time with friends.
They’re getting married next weekend. We were there when they got engaged. I get to be in the wedding.
Tonight I told him that I’d contemplated backing out as I paid to rent the tuxedo.
As of the first of this month, taking aerial photographs of someone’s land in the state of Texas, without the landowner’s permission, is punishable by up to $2,000 and 180 days in jail, each time such a photo is distributed. Journalists are not exempt from this law.
[…]
The law also applies to photos taken in public places, at an altitude greater than eight feet above ground level (AGL)
I remember the first time this happened to me. Rep. Todd Rokita To CNN’s Carol Costello: ‘You’re Beautiful But You Have To Be Honest’ OK, maybe it wasn’t that. But a senator told me I asked too many questions. The nerve of a reporter to do such a thing. When an interview subject says things like this, the odds are good that you’re taking them somewhere they don’t want to go. Keep at them, I say.
Lamar Phillips, the owner of Goal Post Bar-B-Q in Anniston, on Friday closed the doors to his restaurant for the final time.
He said he will sell the business, a fixture of Quintard Avenue since the 1960s, but declined to provide the potential buyer’s name or that person’s intentions for the building.
That Anniston restaurant has some of the best neon around:
I took that picture on Valentine’s Day in 2007. We had dinner that night at a catfish joint. Had I been thinking we would have gone to Goal Post. Catfish was not the best Valentine’s dinner. (Because barbecue is the ideal, of course. And it would have run me $12, apparently.) But we sat right down at the catfish joint, if I recall. Anyway, it was being in the same place that mattered. That year The Yankee was in Atlanta and we spent a lot of time on I-20 going back and forth.
Certain stretches of that road bring it all back.
Anyway, Goal Post was great. The neon is the best in that part of the state. The kicker actually puts the ball through the uprights. You can just see the other parts of the neon fading into the darkness. It looks great in motion. And that kicker has never missed.
Hope they are doing business there again soon.
I hope those American tourists can figure out a way around this barricade at the World War I memorial. I’m more troubled by the presumption that someone would tell you where you may practice your rights.
But the doings at the World War II memorial, just down the mall, are of course getting a lot of attention:
Greatest Generation
“@SykesCharlie: Best WWII Memorial Sign: "NORMANDY WAS CLOSED WHEN WE GOT THERE, TOO."”
The first time I visited the World War II memorial, it was about midnight on a cold December Saturday. It was open, as it was designed to stay open.
The memorial has 4,048 gold stars, each representing 100 Americans who died in the war. “Closing” open memorials with the simple intention of inconveniencing people is, well, simple. But you’ve learned to not expect a lot of nuance out of Washington D.C. these days.
In front of the wall of stars there is the message “Here we mark the price of freedom.”
Here’s a story with a great pull quote: “(W)hen he called the parks service, he was told they would face arrest. ‘I said, are you kidding me? You’re going to arrest a 90/91-year-old veteran from seeing his memorial? If it wasn’t for them it wouldn’t be there. She said, ‘That’s correct sir.””
It is shameful to make sacred places props, both the closing it and the photo opportunity it turned into for some congress members, but there’s not a great supply of shame in Washington.
And, think, we’re just getting started. We’re going about all of this all wrong, on both sides.
By the end of the decade, a nearly nine-fold increase in the volume of devices on the Internet of Things will mean a lot of infrastructure investment and market opportunities will available in this sector.
[…]
Who wins if any of these scenarios takes place? Semiconductor, network, remote sensor and big data vendors will be the lottery winners of such Internet of Things growth, to name a very few. Big data especially: 75 billion devices all generating signals of data to be analyzed and measured, many of which in real- or near-realtime? That’s got big data written all over it.
Designers and engineers look for opportunities in problems. In something that massively big maybe the idea is to look for the problem. My bet is on networking the data — which is challenging in volume — and predictive algorithms.
Now, what would you do with that, if you knew what to do with that?
Sticking to the newsroom, then, there was an afternoon of grading things. And then, in the early evening, we critiqued the Crimson. High story count, but it needs better art, not their best design. As always there were a few critical copy editing points. A solid effort, but, perhaps, not the one of which we are capable.
That’s what the next issue is for, of course. Check out the what the hardworking students at the Crimson are doing, here.
On the drive home I spent a lot of time thinking about the run I was going to do. What? This is supposed to be a rest day, anyway, and I’m thinking about running? As in, I found myself looking forward to it.
I do not know what is happening.
So I ran through the neighborhood in the darkness. Only two stretches of which don’t have good light. One of those, of course, being the short bridge over the creek at the bottom of the neighborhood. There’s a light at the far end and a light down a way from the other side. And, right in the middle of the two sits the bridge. Between having no oxygen in your brain and no light for your eyes it looked like there were goblins and monsters on the bridge.
